Javed Jabbar has pointed out that matriculation, Cambridge and madrasa education systems have been producing three widely different groups of Pakistanis, and that the federal and provincial governments are yet to make any serious attempt to connect the three parallel education systems.
“These three systems don’t have any inter-connection with each other, as they represent three different income groups in Pakistani society,” said the former federal minister and noted scholar.
He was addressing as the keynote speaker at a ceremony held at a hotel on Sunday to mark the conclusion of the first phase of the Badal Do educational training initiative for teachers.
“These three parallel streams of education continue to reinforce utterly negative phenomena of inequity, disparity and lack of cohesion on a massive scale in society,” said Jabbar.
He said that neither is the federal government using its relevant forums, such as the Council of Common Interests and the cabinet, nor are the provincial governments making any attempt to reform these parallel education systems.
“Are we going to continue producing three different sets of Pakistanis? There should be an attempt to introduce a broadly singular education system in place of these three lethal divisions in society.”
The former minister said that an ordinary Pakistani can speak or understand up to five or six languages at a time, so this multilingual nature of Pakistani culture should be truly reflected in the country’s education system.
He said it is high time that the provincial education departments link up with the academic reform initiatives of the private sector so that their impact could be multiplied and expanded to cover large sections of teachers and students associated with public school systems.
He said the Sindh Education Foundation being part of the provincial government’s educational setup could be part of praiseworthy initiatives such as Badal Do, in which a number of the private sector’s like-minded organisations got together to educate schoolteachers and to reform their teaching methodologies for the students’ advantage.
He said 20 million children are out of schools in the country, accounting for 10 per cent of the country’s total population of 200 million. This is quite an alarming figure, which poses a daunting challenge for the government to educate everyone, he added.
Shahnaz Wazir Ali, former special assistant to prime minister and ex-chairperson of Higher Education Commission, appreciated that the Badal Do initiative rightly targeted schoolteachers as the most effective agents of change in society.
She said schoolteachers should perceive their own cultural diversity and the pluralistic nature of Pakistani society as well as the related values of tolerance and peaceful coexistence among different sections of society, so the same set of values could be taught to their students.
She also stressed the need to bring reforms and improvement in the school curricula in order to help inculcate such good social values among the teachers.
The audience were informed that the Badal Do conducted trainings for 400 teachers of 204 schools in low- and middle-income group areas of the city to educate them about good social values that would help them understand and appreciate cultural, linguistic, ethnic and religious diversities of the country.
The training sessions that ran for a year also taught teachers about their important civic responsibilities and good social practices. In the next phase the Badal Do initiative would target 5,000 teachers in 300 schools of the city.
